In one of the craziest elections in American history, Barack Obama overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th President of the United States

Mark Felt, 1913-2008

Bob Daugherty / AP

Mark Felt.

No one likes a snitch, but Mark Felt, the former FBI agent who late in life
revealed himself as the great mystery man known as Deep Throat, performed an
act of high patriotism by helping Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose the most serious set of political crimes
in American history. His identity also became one of the great journalistic
obsessions of the 20th century. The obsession with the identity of Deep
Throat sometimes took journalists down strange detours even though tracking
down a competitor's source is not the highest journalistic calling. At TIME,
a couple of us pursued a thesis that we thought led to Alexander Haig. But
that proved to be a dead end when Felt started to go public about his role
as Deep Throat in 2005. Woodward subsequently published a short book
detailing the relationship, providing the most interesting footnotes to a
grim historical moment in the country's history.